


Playground Psychology

by pyalgroundblz (acidtonguejenny)



Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: M/M, preslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-28
Updated: 2010-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidtonguejenny/pseuds/pyalgroundblz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a bead of water making a halting journey down the back of Harry’s neck, and every time it moves even the tiniest bit it draws Butters' attention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playground Psychology

No matter what Harry or his friends said, Butters wasn't cut out to be a doctor. Living skin freaked him out when he had to touch it with…needles and stuff.

Admittedly, he was quickly becoming acclimated to it. One couldn't have medical skills (of a sort), such a phobia, and a friend like Harry Dresden without one of the three getting the boot. And since brain bleach was still in the drawing-board stage and Butters liked Harry, it was his Eek-it's-alive! thing that had to go. Was going.

And apparently it was taking his heterosexuality with it. Because while Butters had been in relatively close proximity with sweaty/wet, half-naked men before (locker rooms, a stable fact of life in the 21st century), he had never wanted to lick any of those men. Put a little distance between himself and that gym-sock smell, yeah. Lick? No.

But right now, there is a bead of water making a halting journey down the back of Harry's neck, and every time it moves even the tiniest bit, it draws his attention from the long gash he's supposed to be stitching closed. Harry is humming and unaware, flipping passively through the paperback he'd helped himself too from Butters' desk. Fresh from the showers of the morgue's employee-changing rooms, his skin is happily pink and still steaming, and water runs from his hair. Butters hadn't been able to convince him that a cold was worth worrying about, and it's still wet.

From the top of his scapula to about halfway down the lumbar, there are four, oozing slices—claw marks, though Harry had only made a noncommittal sound when Butters asked. Butters had closed two of them and has mostly finished the third—but that drop! It slides around the bony knot at the top of Harry's spine, and rolls for a few inches down his back.

He bites his lip desperately, watching it catching and sliding and coming closer to the slashes, until his sanity snaps and he darts forward to intercept it. Harry jerks with an unmanly squeak when his flattened tongue drags over the edge of the outermost slash, the shallowest one, before lapping up the offending drop.

When he pulls away and looks up again, bashful, cheeks burning, he is met with a dark-eyed, bemused stare.

"Um." Butters begins, searching furiously for something to say. "There was a drop of wa-t-ter." He points vaguely at Harry's back as if to say, 'see? that's a totally cool explanation for licking a dude.'

Right.

Harry blinks at him for a moment, mouth poised as if he'd been meaning to speak but had forgotten to, and twists as if he's trying to look. But he hisses when the action disturbs the newly stitched wounds, and reaches a hand around on reflex to investigate the site. Butters immediately smacks the approaching fingers away, and forgets his humiliation for a moment as he gives the wizard a tongue-lashing for trying to put dirty hands where they don't belong. Harry appears properly chastened when he finishes with a passionate "Hmph!", and Butters offers mental thanks to every deity he can think of.

All appears to be forgotten, and Butters eventually forgets—well. He doesn't forget his budding attraction, and he even strives to remember the texture of the wizard's skin against his tongue for that flash of second—but he forgets to cringe whenever he sees Harry. He forgets that he's due what is sure to be a really awkward Q&A. Subconsciously, Butters doesn't even think Harry remembers.

But he does, of course he does.

Sometime after what he privately thinks of as the Licking Incident, Harry appears in his morgue. He's on some case that he refuses to share even the most superficial details about, and finagles Butters into letting him sleep on gurney pulled out from one of the empty refrigerated compartments.

His legs hang off one end, and he squirms for a while before falling asleep—and a little bit after that, too. Butters sympathizes with him; he's used those things for naps before, and there's a reason why only dead people are subjected to them. That level of discomfort is probably illegal in some parts of the country.

Harry manages it, but he's only been asleep for about half an hour when Butters hears the familiar, heavy-footed sound of his boss's overpriced shoes rapidly approaching his office.

Butters runs to shove Harry's gurney into its compartment, stares, at a loss, at the protruding calves, decides to leave the locker's door open to cover them, and scrambles for his deskchair. He's tapping ineffectively at his computer—which is powered down, of course—and silently praying that Harry will have sense enough to keep his mouth shut if he's woken up, when his boss (Hate. Kill. Hisssss.) barges in, and says something.

Butters nods and looks attentive, but tunes out whatever is said with the ease of long habit, and sighs in relief when the older man stomps away again.

He hopes it wasn't important.

A long moment after the door is slammed closed behind the bossman, Butters hears unintelligible grumbling coming from the locker. Biting his lips against a small smile, he creeps back to the compartment and reaches to extend the gurney. Harry's face comes into view eventually, and the look on it when it does is baleful and distinctly unhappy.

Butters giggles nervously, amused by the scruffy state of his friend, and shrugs. "Boss." He says.

Harry's voice when he speaks is two steps from Sleepy Caveman. "I heard."

He gives Harry's leg a friendly pat and makes to return to his paperback, but Harry heaves himself upright with a groan and catches his forearm.

Butters looks at him curiously, and Eeps! when he's dragged closer and Harry bends down. He registers a hot, fleeting touch to his cheek, and a chill when he's released. Harry sleepy!glares at him, lays back down, and begins the long process of dozing off on a gurney for a second time.

Butters belatedly realizes that he's just been licked.

Um. What? Did Harry, the all-powerful, all-frightening, mega-tall badass wizard just use eye-for-an-eye, playground-psychology on him?

Butters begins to return to his desk, but turns back after a few steps and bangs on the locker beside Harry's.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." He snaps, ignoring the one-eyed glare he's receiving, and trots back to his desk feeling fulfilled.

Harry blows a raspberry at him on his way out two hours later, and Butters just props his feet on his desk, snake-smug.


End file.
